Your life will probably not turn out as you expect. Nothing ever does. I am not saying it will be better or worse, just different. Don’t force it. A lot will depend on the decisions you make. Please spend time on your decision making, it will pay dividends.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. You can only get experience by living your own life so I can’t make it easy for you. You are going to make mistakes. You will learn from all of them. Cuts and bruises are going to happen if you live your life. A good scar is the beginning of a great story. Try to keep your mistakes to a minimum. Know a bad idea when you see it. Bad judgment comes from your gut, so listen to it. If your gut tells you something is a bad idea it probably is. You have it, I know you do. When you were a Junior in High School Billy and Rick tried to make you get in the car after we had been drinking all night. You said no, they called you a pussy. But two mothers had to identify headless bodies at the morgue that night, not three. Please remember that night it will serve you well.

Listen to your father. He knows. There are going to be times that you think he has no idea what you are going through, you will be wrong. When you are impulsive, he will want to slow you down. Hear him out. Ask him about his childhood, it will make you understand why he is like he is. He doesn’t always show it, but you’re the best thing that ever happened to him. Don’t wait until all you have is a gravestone to tell him how much you loved him. Tell him now.

Don’t be ashamed of where you came from. There are some uncles and cousins that are white trash embarrassment’s but they are family and a reminder of what you could have been if your father didn’t work so hard to escape it. They are where you started, not where you will end up. When they call you the rich kid because your father worked hard, joined a union and bought a house it’s their journey. Not yours.

Don’t pick your friends. Just be yourself and it will happen. The best people in high school are the ones that talked to everybody. Don’t wait until after high school to learn this. There will be a time when Nerds are cool.

Don’t shy away from hard work. Someday someone will ask you where you learned to work like you do. You will thank your Dad. And you will know that they are impressed by you. You will have friends whose Daddy’s will buy them shiny new cars. You will work for yours, and because of that, it will be nicer than theirs. Hard work will give you something you will always savor and desire, the feeling of accomplishing something. Hopefully, you will never lose that feeling.

You will love the ladies. When looking for “the one” look for cute and nice. You will find that Hot often means bitch. The hot ones always look for the next, better deal. The cute and nice one, if you treat her properly will be looking at you and she will be yours to lose. After the looks are gone, you will still love her for the nice. And you will suffer a broken heart, maybe more than once, I can’t tell you how many. It’s ok to marry the 2nd runner-up.

Be a good friend. It’s a rare and valuable commodity.

Be kind to others. It’s free.

Talk to old people. You will love them and they will love you.

Listen more than you talk. It will serve you well and people will wonder what you are thinking about and it will piss them off.

The wake was early, viewing 8:30-10:00 and funeral immediately after. I had a doctor’s appointment at 11:30 so I couldn’t go to the funeral. I was there at 9. I had to leave at 7 AM to do it but I made it.

I was pleased to see the turnout. For a guy that we thought was a bit of a loner, he had a lot of people come out for him today. Even though I have known since Tuesday of his passing, and memorialized him in a post yesterday, it didn’t fully sink in that he was really gone. As I stood over his open casket it became very real.

We said goodbye to a very good man today.

I wouldn’t call John a friend, more like a work friend. I don’t know what he did on the weekends but I always suspected it was boring. But Monday through Friday we had a great work relationship that started a little rocky, we had very different personalities but grew into one of mutual respect and personal familiarity. He was there when I started and we walked out the door together when the company shut its doors. It saddens me now that he didn’t cross my mind much after we said goodbye that day. Like a said, more of a work friend.

Of course, I didn’t know he would be dead in 18 months.

John was a nice guy. We all know the “dead mystique”, everyone is nice when they’re gone. I’m sure there are people who thought that Jeffrey Dahmer was a nice guy. There’s no accounting for taste (see what I did there?). But John really was. He never spoke badly of anyone. He turned and left if people began to gossip. He was always willing to help. He cared for his mother tirelessly for years. He called his brother every night at 8pm. He took care of himself. And the aneurysm that shot to his brain on Monday night didn’t give a shit about any of that.

I’m glad that I tell people how I feel about them, of course, it can go the other way also. I have lost too many people in my life and I am sick of talking to tombstones. It’s too late when you’re saying it to a piece of marble. I know that on more than one occasion I told John how much I appreciate him, and he scoffed it off in his self-deflecting manner. But I take solace knowing that I did.

Death is so random. It doesn’t care who you are, what you did or how you did it. Good people die young and bad people die old. It makes belief in God difficult if you are one to try to make sense of things. I am so comfortable in my not knowing how it works that I will continue to tell people how much I appreciate them. Because tomorrow may be too late.

Do you see us as a couple? We are married, legally, but that seems to be where it ends. We are far apart, figuratively and literally. I now live 100 miles away so we are actually apart, and when we are together we are not really together.

When we separated 10 months ago it was a “financial separation”. We couldn’t afford to live together anymore. It was a horrible moment in my life. The family got along pretty good in that house. Which is good because the bank took the other one.

We had always struggled financially but for 6 years we had kept the waterline just below our noses. Our home, while only a rental, was warm and accommodating. For the first time all of our children had their own rooms. We had a table to eat dinner as a family, 3 times a year. I had my own room because we haven’t shared a bed in 15 years. I slept on a sofa of course but it was still in my own room. We kept the fighting to a minimum. My favorite part was that every night I would listen for the front door and I would know that all of my kids, whether I got the opportunity to talk to them before they went to bed or not, were home safe. I loved that feeling and I miss it more than anything.

You had it all planned out, almost too well. When I lost my job and my income went from just enough to nothing you knew just what to do, as if you had thought about it for a while. The oldest 2 would go to your mother’s while still in college (not a bad deal for them) and you would move in with your best friend in NH with our 2 youngest. The same best friend that you basically admitted that you had chosen over me about 10 years ago. As far as where I would live, I really appreciate how you unceremoniously told me to “find someplace to live”. But I did. I sucked it up and moved in with my friend and his family. I fucking hated how you handled it but hey that’s life.

After my last hospital stay my anger subsided a little. You were very diligent in visiting me, pestering the doctors for information and I felt supported. But when I was released, moved in with my mother 100 miles away and applied for SSDI we were reduced to a schedule of seeing each other twice a month and speaking once a week, if at all.

When I visit, I drive 2 hours to see you and our youngest two. I usually catch you as you’re heading out the door to work. That’s not a coincidence. I try to see our youngest boy, the popular and hard-working high-school senior who is busy with his life and almost never available when I am. He and I used to talk for hours at home about music, food, and anything that came up. Now I never see him. I get a couple of hours with our youngest, the beautiful 15-year-old who has not adjusted to life in her new “home” and sits in her room alone for hours playing on her phone when you’re not home. I spent so many hours hanging with her, we miss each other like crazy. She tells me all the time. I can only spend a couple of hours there because I have to drive another 45 minutes south to see our oldest 2. I can usually coordinate a dinner or a coffee with our wonderful oldest daughter who I have the most complex relationship with. I am proud that I salvaged our relationship, for a while I thought I had lost her. And I have to find a way to meet with our oldest son who I so lovingly refer to as “mini-me”. He’s like my best friend. But between school and work, he’s never around so getting time with him can also be a long shot. Then I have a 2-hour drive home. It’s a long day and it is very unfulfilling.

I recall my now defunct career as a series of really hard jobs, some that I hated, some not so much. I worked really hard and I put in a lot of hours. I put up with a tremendous amount of shit and held back a lot of punches and urges to walk out because my family needed me. I always believed that someday I would break through and make some real money. And you, for your part raised our 4 children and did a very good job. I will always respect you for it. We both spent too much money, you needed to eat at restaurants with your friend (you can only have one person in your life at a time and it was always her not me) 5 days a week for your “mental health”. And I suppose I hit the pub a few times too many as a reward for my thankless work at companies that never gave a fuck about me despite the blood and guts that I gave them. But your best use of our money was when you went to college. And did nothing with it. You spent a buttload of money on a degree that you never intended to use because you wanted to spend more time with your little friend. Don’t you think that medical coding degree could have come in handy as our family’s finances collapsed? To your credit, you did give me the satisfaction of admitting this last week on the phone but a lot of good it is doing us now. I hope all of those fun days in class were worth it.

You always accused me of having affairs. You couldn’t imagine how a man could go so long without sex. Yet you were the one who shut it off. Do you realize that it has been over 7 years since we touched each other? And I have never cheated on you, despite multiple opportunities. Is there a man alive that would go that long without straying? But I didn’t because I’m honest. A man doesn’t cheat. And I know what would have happened if I did, I would lose the only thing I have left, the respect of my children.

Do you remember about 6 years ago when I told you I wanted to move in with my friend because I was tired of the fighting? We had just had a terrible argument in front of our kids and I decided that I couldn’t continue like this. Your first reaction was to tell me “good luck seeing the kids.” I knew then that you were the despicable type that would play the kids against me. And I then knew if I ever cheated on you, justified or not, you would tear me apart to my kids. And for that, I will never forgive you. But I stayed.

Yet I feel sorry for you. I worry about you. I might stop short at saying I love you but I don’t hate you. You did a lot for me when we were younger and I am truly grateful. But we are two different people now. We grew in very different directions.

If we were to come into some money tomorrow would you want to move back in with me? Do I want to go back to sleeping on the sofa? Would the fighting start, would the kids again be forced to take your side and gang up on me in any argument for fear of your retribution? Yes, that’s right, they know that I’m the one that they can shit on knowing that I’ll forgive them. Yes, you’re that parent.

You once told me that your worst fear is to be alone. As your husband and a man of his word, I feel obligated to care for you regardless of how well we get along. And I will. But I have to ask, at what point does my happiness matter? I have spent very little time on my own happiness and I may not bring it up again. But what are we doing here? I don’t have any plans that hang on your answer, I just wonder if you think about this like I do.

I strongly suspect that I am a good bit older than most of the bloggers I follow. But I relate well to them. I often wonder if they relate to my posts (judging by the amount of hits I’m getting not many). I write from the perspective of an adult, albeit an emotionally stunted one at times, with grown children, many years of life experience and the added bonus of chronic illness just to keep it interested. I think young because in my heart I’m a much younger man than my license suggests. And it has worked for me. A firm policy of consciously avoiding uttering the words “kids today” has served me well.

I am at a wonderful stage where I am still a player in the game of life but able to have an advantage. That advantage is wisdom.

Wis-dom

noun

the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.

Wisdom is gained through experience. I do have plenty of that. Good decisions come from experience and experience is gained through making bad decisions. I have made a lot of bad decisions. Among the things I wish I had told my father before he died is how many times he was right and I chose to do it my way. And it cost me. Other experience is gained through the course of living life, surviving what life throws at you. And I have been through a lot of shit. If God gives you all he thinks you can handle he must think I’m Rambo.

Now that I have it what do I do with it? Wisdom, in the form of advice, must be distributed carefully. By that I mean it shouldn’t be offered unsolicited. I firmly follow the “opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one” mantra. I’m not that guy that offers up “hey do you know what I think”. But lately I’ve found myself dispensing a lot of advice, advice that is being asked of me. Friends texting me, inboxing me, calling me with dilemmas of all nature. I think I have been able to help a bit in some cases.

I find it odd to be a source of good advice given my situation. I’m not in a good place at all. But people aren’t coming to me about matters of high finance and which fork to use for the appetizer. They are asking me about matters of life. Relationships, family matters, how to handle people, the list goes on. Apparently, I am known as a guy who has “been there” and knows what to do. Sadly, that is true. I have had some really bad jobs, horrible bosses, bad girlfriends, a lousy marriage, regrettable moments of anger with the family that I will always regret and on top of that several serious health scares. And I learned from all of them. The biggest lessons learned by adhering to the following:

A man does what he has to do

Life is not always fun

It’s bigger than you, you have a family

Get busy living or get busy dying

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does

I deliberately avoid giving advice, but I am glad to share what I know. We all have a purpose in life, maybe my recent assignment is to share what I have learned so that someone else may benefit. The biggest advice I would offer anyone is to live life, take your hits, learn from them and move on. You can’t learn from someone else’s experience. But there are people you can learn from. Take them up on it. Everyone can teach you something, even if by poor example they show you something you don’t want.

“Religion is sitting in church thinking about a Kayak. Spirituality is sitting in a Kayak thinking about God”

I identified as an atheist for most of my adult life. I went through the motions through my late teen years. I went to the local Baptist church with my mom and dad. We dressed nice and walked into the church wearing our most “pious” faces. I stood during hymns without singing, I tried to close my eyes during prayer but I was more interested in seeing who else had their eyes open. I was people watching, a habit I have never outgrown.

I dreaded going to church, it didn’t interest me and I got nothing out of it. With the exception of a few genuinely nice people, I saw a lot of contemptible people. There was the rich guy that held up the 100 dollar bill for all to see before he put it in the collection plate. Then there was the “Deacon”, father of my friend Jeff, who beat Jeff every Sunday after church. Then there was the endless string of parasites that milked the congregation for all of the charity they could and then disappeared. The list goes on.

And then there was “the incident” in which I told the pompous ass of a Southern Baptist minister, who cheated on his wife, where to go and how to get there when he refused to marry my widowed aunt because her fiancé was divorced. I became famous and an outcast overnight. I was asked not to return to the church for the egregious offense of defending a beloved family member from his puritanical bullshit. I was happy to oblige. I would not enter another church, with the exception of weddings and funerals, for over twenty years.

My mother would insist that my refusal to go to church was because of that incident. I could never convince her that it wasn’t just that. Sure, that minister was an ass. He was run out himself 2 years later when his affair was revealed. But I knew that was only one church. The truth, I tried to convince my dear mother, was that I just didn’t feel it. Whatever it is, the feeling you are supposed to have in the church, I didn’t have it. And I had questions. How can the kindly old man with the flowing white robe give babies cancer, let bad things happen to good people and let assholes thrive and reproduce? I respected that other people believed in it but it wasn’t for me.

Because of my tendency (past tense) to be “black and white,” it naturally followed that if I wasn’t possessed by the holy spirit then I must be an atheist. Agnosticism had no appeal, it just screamed of “indecisive”. I wasn’t militant like most atheists. I didn’t want to convert anyone (they won’t admit it but they are their own church). I would hear anyone out who wanted to talk about it, it just didn’t stick. And even when on my deathbed due to a severe staph infection, when I “went down” for four minutes before a routine bed check saved my life, I never prayed. I didn’t even think to.
As the saying goes “there are no atheists in foxholes” and in my late forties, I was in a foxhole. My family, finances, marriage, and health were in the tank and I was opening myself up to all possibilities. I began to entertain the notion of spirituality. That maybe God didn’t exist within a building. It wasn’t God or the idea of a higher power I was rejecting it was organized religion. Also, I found it arrogant of atheists to be “sure” that God didn’t exist, no one can be certain of that. If you can’t prove it’s not there then it could be there. I needed something else in my life. For a short while, I did feel selfish, like the people I had before rejected because they used God to serve their selfish needs. A hypocrite I am not.

Then my father died.

My father had Parkinson’s disease. He suffered terribly for a lot of years. His death crushed me. Among the many emotions I was experiencing, I felt so bad that a man who worked so hard all of his life never caught a break. He worked, he got sick and he died. I opened myself up to a God and an afterlife because I wanted it for him, to get him the peace he deserved and had prayed for. It wasn’t for me and it still isn’t. I soon became the guy that visits cemeteries and talk to headstones. But it’s not so bad because, unlike any church I’ve been in, I felt God at the cemetery. I see God in a lot of places now.
It isn’t that my mind is open, it is my paradigm that has changed. God doesn’t have to look like the artists have drawn him. Prayer doesn’t have to be in a building. Blessings don’t necessarily have to be readily apparent to us. And the reasons things happen don’t necessarily have to make sense to us. To me, God has shown up in the form of a beautiful fall day, an amazing conversation with a stranger, a pleasant breeze on a fall day, in the laugh of a child, or in the crystal clear water of the lake as I sit in my Kayak.

I go to church once in a while now. I sit in the back. I stand when the hymns are sung but I don’t sing. I try to close my eyes during prayer but I’m not convinced that I need to in order to talk to God. I go for the sermons hoping for something I can use. Some people probably don’t like how I don’t take communion because I still don’t believe in rituals. It’s their problem, not mine, it’s not as if I’m trying to offend them. My relationship with my version of God is uniquely mine. If I don’t talk to him right now I will probably see him next time I am out in my Kayak. I believe that you find things the moment you stop looking for them. Maybe it was right there in front of me all along.

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